67: Frauen - Alison Owings
It’s taken me an immense amount of time to read this book, with consequent impact on my total number of books read this year (which I can glimpse approaching through the mist). That’s not just because it’s well over 400 pages of teeny, tiny type, but because the content is so genuinely upsetting that I've had to put it aside numerous times and could only read it in small chunks.
Owings is an American who, in the late 80s/early 90s, interviewed some 50 German women who’d lived through the Third Reich - 29 testimonies made it into the book. Her reason was that we invariably hear a male-centric view of the events of WW2, but very rarely a female one. Her subjects range from a woman who successfully fed and hid her (Jewish) best friend for over two years in the heart of Berlin, living in an apartment with prominent Nazi supporters living on either side, to another who was sent by the authorities to work as a guard in a prison camp, where Hungarian Jewish women were set to work at the terrible and dangerous task of filling shells with explosive.
There are all shades of experience in between - working-class women, religious women, Party members, those who later repented and are appalled at the crimes of the regime, and - horrifically - those who clearly still don’t see what Hitler did that was so bad. All were forced to live their lives under the Nazis by different pressures - social, economic, legal, familial - but not all responded in the same way.
Owings transcribes their (taped) conversations with vivid renderings of each woman’s dialect and manner, and she doesn’t keep herself out of the exchanges, which makes sense to me, although some reviews online don’t like this approach. Whatever - this is an impressive but completely blood-curdling book, with some details that are the stuff of nightmares. The utter horror of the Nazi's obsessive grip on every single aspect of German life pervades each line and makes you realise the true, sickening meaning of where a society is headed the moment it starts to single out and demonise some of its members. It’s impossible not to look around at our own circumstances right now and feel very uneasy indeed.